She Turned Toward Him

John 20:16 (NIV)

Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher)."

I’ve photographed the sunrise dozens of times from all over the world. One rule never changes: don't shoot before civil twilight — that window when the sun is still below the horizon, but there's enough light to make out shapes and colors. It's not darkness anymore, but it isn't day yet. It's a world that hasn't decided what it's going to look like yet.

That’s the light Mary walks into. She should have waited, but she didn’t. Her grief wouldn’t let her, because her grief doesn't respect the calendar or the clock.

She had cried through the worst of it on Friday, watching from a distance as they took him down from the cross. You'd think that she wouldn’t have any tears left. At some point, she put a lid on her grief, and by Sunday morning, she had pushed that lid shut with both hands — he's dead, I watched it, I know where they laid him.

And maybe some of her grief is for her. She walked behind Jesus for three years, listening as he said the world was about to turn over — and then didn’t. It just ended, on a Friday afternoon. All those things she heard went into the ground with him. Her grief is not only for Jesus, but also for a hope she'd let herself believe.

So she comes to the tomb with her mind made up. When she gets there, though, the facts in her mind don’t match the reality she sees. The stone is moved. The grave clothes are there, but the body isn't. She is stunned. The one solid thing she had left — knowing where his body was — has died like her hope did. She runs and tells Peter and John the only conclusion she can come to: someone's taken him. Not he is risen. Someone's taken him. Grave robbery, not resurrection.

Then she's alone again, weeping, and there's a man standing near her.

She thinks he's the gardener.

It's tempting to read that as a mistake — bad light, wet eyes, an honest case of not-looking-carefully. It is not a failure of her eyes. It's that she isn't looking for a living man She puts the man she sees into the nearest category that fits — gardener, stranger, anyone but Jesus.

Then the man says one word.

Mary.

Her name, said the one way only he says it, and the lid she's spent three days pressing shut comes flying off without her doing a thing.

She recognizes Jesus, and before she can even think, she calls out to him using the word most descriptive of her relationship with him — Rabbouni. Not just “teacher,” but “my teacher,” the word you use for the one person you trust completely, spoken by someone she thought she would never hear again, the same way he had spoken to her the first time he met her.

He didn't wait for her grief to clear, didn't wait for her eyes to adjust to the light, didn't require her to work out the theology of an empty tomb first. He found her exactly where she was — grieving, mistaken, looking at him and seeing a stranger — and called her by name anyway. Her eyes never did the work. Her ears did.

I know something about eyes that don't do the work. I've stood behind a camera at that same gray hour and missed the shot because I was looking for the picture I'd already decided was there. The light doesn't care what you came to find. Neither, it turns out, does grace. It just says your name, and waits for you to turn around.

Father, we come to you carrying made-up minds, certain we already know how the story ends. Meet us there. Speak our name before we've turned around, before we've earned the right to hear it, before we even know it's you standing near. Teach us to recognize you not because we finally looked hard enough, but because you called first. Amen.

This devotional was written by Cliff McCartney.

Grace for All is a daily devotional podcast produced by the members of the congregation of First United Methodist Church in Maryville, Tennessee. With these devotionals, we want to remind listeners on a daily basis of the love and grace that God extends to all human beings, no matter their location, status, or condition in life.

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